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The Fifth Discipline

By Peter M. Senge • Watered over 3 years ago December 27, 2021 at 4:56 AM
The Fifth Discipline cover

Highlights

  • Organizations can get into considerable difficulty if they become too aggressive in promoting personal mastery for their members.
  • There’s nothing more powerful you can do to encourage others in their quest for personal mastery than to be serious in your own quest.
  • “Although people do not [always] behave congruently with their espoused theories [what they say], they do behave congruently with their theories-in-use [their mental models].”2
  • what is most important to grasp is that mental models are active—they shape how we act.
  • Two people with different mental models can observe the same event and describe it differently, because they’ve looked at different details and made different interpretations.
  • But the industry treated these principles as “a magic formula for success for all time, when all it had found was a particular set of conditions … that were good for a limited time.”
  • The problems with mental models arise when they become implicit—when they exist below the level of our awareness.
  • Because we remain unaware of our mental models, the models remain unexamined. Because they are unexamined, the models remain unchanged. As the world changes, the gap widens between our mental models and reality, leading to increasingly counterproductive actions.
  • The danger of distributing power well is that you become fragmented, which makes ensuring that learning occurs across the business difficult.
  • The healthy corporations will be ones which can systematize ways to bring people together to develop the best possible mental models for facing any situation at hand.”
  • Skills of reflection concern slowing down our own thinking processes so that we can become more aware of how we form our mental models and the ways they influence our actions.
  • Inquiry skills concern how we operate in face-to-face interactions with others, especially in dealing with complex and conflictual issues.
    • Tags: learning
  • the most crucial mental models in any organization are those shared by key decision makers.
  • Generative learning, in my experience, requires people at all levels who can surface and challenge their mental models before external circumstances compel them to do so.
  • Until the gap between my espoused theory and my current behavior is recognized, no learning can occur.
  • Leaps of abstraction occur when we move from direct observations (concrete “data”) to generalization without testing.
  • Leaps of abstraction impede learning because they become axiomatic. What was once an assumption becomes treated as a fact.
  • when inquiry and advocacy are balanced, I would not only be inquiring into the reasoning behind others’ views but would be stating my views in such a way as to reveal my own assumptions and reasoning and to invite others to inquire into them.
    • Tags: learning
    • Note: The best way to balance inquiry and advocacy consistently is to create systems, e.g. RFC templates where people are forced to make their case with objective facts and are forced to surface any assumptions they might have.
  • When operating in pure advocacy, the goal is to win the argument. When inquiry and advocacy are combined, the goal is no longer “to win the argument” but to find the best argument.
  • It turns out that people can live very well with the situation where they make their case and yet another view is implemented, so long as the learning process is open and everyone acts with integrity.
    • Tags: leadership
    • Note: Being transparent about your thought process is what allows people to disagree and commit. They don’t agree with you, but they can understand your reasoning and appreciate the fact that you are committed. When you’re not transparent about your thought process and still want people to follow you, the best you can get is compliance, not commitment.
  • At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, “What do we want to create?”
  • A vision is truly shared when you and I have a similar picture and are committed to one another having it, not just to each of us, individually, having it.
    • Tags: leadership
    • Note: The best orgs are ones where people trust one another to make the right decisions, because they know that they share the same vision.
  • With a shared vision, we are more likely to expose our ways of thinking, give up deeply held views, and recognize personal and organizational shortcomings. All that trouble seems trivial compared with the importance of what we are trying to create.
  • Shared vision fosters risk taking and experimentation. When people are immersed in a vision, they often don’t know how to do it. They run an experiment. They change direction and run another experiment. Everything is an experiment, but there is no ambiguity.
  • People do not focus on the long term because they have to, but because they want to.
  • Shared visions emerge from personal visions. This is how they derive their energy and how they foster commitment.
  • personal mastery is the bedrock for developing shared visions. This means not only personal vision, but commitment to the truth and creative tension—the hallmarks of personal mastery.
  • So, too, is each individual’s vision of the whole unique. We each have our own way of seeing the larger vision.
  • When more people come to share a common vision, the vision may not change fundamentally. But it becomes more alive, more real in the sense of a mental reality that people can truly imagine achieving.
  • For those in leadership positions, what is most important is to remember that their visions are still personal visions. Just because they occupy a position of leadership does not mean that their personal visions are automatically “the organization’s vision.”
  • leaders intent on building shared visions must be willing to continually share their personal visions.
  • Visions that are truly shared take time to emerge.
  • You’re “committed” when you are not only enrolled but feel fully responsible for making the vision happen.
  • POSSIBLE ATTITUDES TOWARD A VISION Commitment: Wants it. Will make it happen. Creates whatever “laws” (structures) are needed. Enrollment: Wants it. Will do whatever can be done within the “spirit of the law.” Genuine compliance: Sees the benefits of the vision. Does everything expected and more. Follows the “letter of the law.” “Good soldier.” Formal compliance: On the whole, sees the benefits of the vision. Does what’s expected and no more. “Pretty good soldier.” Grudging compliance: Does not see the benefits of the vision. But, also, does not want to lose job. Does enough of what’s expected because he has to, but also lets it be known that he is not really on board. Noncompliance: Does not see benefits of vision and will not do what’s expected. “I won’t do it; you can’t make me.” Apathy: Neither for nor against vision. No interest. No energy. “Is it five o’clock yet?”
  • On the other hand, a person who was truly committed to the official speed limit would drive that speed even if it were not a legal limit.
  • In his own mind, the person operating in genuine compliance often thinks of himself as committed. He is, in fact, committed, but only to being “part of the team.”
  • The committed person brings an energy, passion, and excitement that cannot be generated by someone who is only compliant, even genuinely compliant.
  • The committed person doesn’t play by the rules of the game. He is responsible for the game.
  • ultimately, there is really nothing you can do to get another person to enroll or commit. Enrollment and commitment require freedom of choice.
  • the visioning process is a special type of inquiry process. It is an inquiry into the future we truly seek to create. If it becomes a pure advocacy process, it will result in compliance, at best, not commitment.
  • Visions can also die because people become discouraged by the apparent difficulty in bringing the vision into reality.
  • In this structure [where people get discouraged from achieving their shared vision], the limiting factor is the capacity of people in the organization to “hold” creative tension, the central principle of personal mastery. This is why we say that personal mastery is the bedrock for developing shared vision—organizations that do not encourage personal mastery find it very difficult to foster sustained commitment to a lofty vision.
  • The fundamental characteristic of the relatively unaligned team is wasted energy. Individuals may work extraordinarily hard, but their efforts do not efficiently translate to team effort.
  • Individuals do not sacrifice their personal interests to the larger team vision; rather, the shared vision becomes an extension of their personal visions.
  • alignment is the necessary condition before empowering the individual will empower the whole team.
  • Team learning is the process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire.
  • In dialogue, there is the free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues, a deep “listening” to one another and suspending of one’s own views.
    • Tags: learning decision-making
  • Defensive routines form a sort of protective shell around our deepest assumptions, defending us against pain, but also keeping us from learning about the causes of the pain.
    • Tags: learning
  • Deep within the mental models of managers in many organizations is the belief that managers must know what’s going on. It is simply unacceptable for managers to act as though they do not know what is causing a problem.
  • The more effective defensive routines are, the more effectively they cover up underlying problems, the less effectively these problems are faced, and the worse the problems tend to become.
    • Tags: learning decision-making
  • When we are feeling defensive, seeking to avoid an issue, thinking we need to protect someone else or ourselves—these are tangible signals that can be used to reestablish a climate of learning.
    • Tags: decision-making learning
  • A team committed to learning must be committed not only to telling the truth about what’s going on “out there,” in their business reality, but also about what’s going on “in here,” within the team itself.
    • Tags: learning decision-making
  • the journey from invention to successful innovation in technology represents a search for synergies among diverse developments, which only together enable something new to be viable.
    • Tags: organization-design learning management leadership
    • Note: Multiple factors are required for a new invention to become a successful, widespread innovation, other than its birth. New inventions typically need the right ecosystem to flourish: until that ecosystem exists, they may stay hidden for years, or even fail. Interestingly, there’s a parallelism here between “engineering” inventions (e.g., the airplane), and “org design” inventions (e.g., new practices, rituals, business units): you can’t just make something new appear out of sheer will—you need to create the right support system around it.
  • “making money for a company is like oxygen for a person; if you don’t have enough of it you’re out of the game.”
  • Leaders who appreciate organizations as living systems approach design work differently. They realize that they can create organizational artifacts like new metrics, or formal roles and processes, or intranet Web sites, or innovative meetings—but it is what happens when people use the artifacts or processes or participate in the meetings that matters.
  • The hallmark of good design is the absence of crisis—not a good way to get attention in a “leaders are heroes” organization culture.
    • Tags: management
  • The wicked leader is he whom the people revile. The good leader is he whom the people revere. The great leader is he of whom the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
  • As with most shifting the burden situations, the successful strategy is to respond to short-term opportunities in ways that build longer-term capacity, to connect “event-driven systems thinking” with “developmental systems thinking.”
    • Tags: systems organization-design
  • The second paradox of stewardship, conservation and change, comes from the fact that in one sense, leadership is always about change. Leaders, individually and collectively, work to bring about a different order of things. Their focus is invariably on the new, on what is trying to emerge. I believe one of the reasons a deep sense of purpose is so important for leaders is that it also provides an anchor. While pursuing what is new and emergent, they are also stewards for something they intend to conserve.
  • Stocking’s comments suggest a secret appreciated by all too few managers: having a larger life might actually help managers maintain a sense of perspective and be better managers.
    • Tags: management personal-growth
  • If you take the time to figure out with people how you can get a system that is going to continue to deliver better results, it takes a lot longer but when you’ve got it, it doesn’t walk away from you.
  • Despite all their many differences, truly effective leaders seem to come to a shared appreciation of the power of holding a vision and concurrently looking deeply and honestly at current reality.
  • In one sense, it is illogical to think that the well-being of a company can be advanced independent of the well-being of its industry, its society, and the natural systems upon which it depends.
  • The system is not only out there, it is in here.
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